Mumi

Description

David de Ugarte:
The anthropologist Marvin Harris describes mumis, in
his Life Without Chiefs, as one of the pillars of society
among the Siuai in the Solomon Islands. Even though he
includes the study of mumis within his research into social
evolution towards hierarchisation, the very survival of the
figure of the mumi to this day shows how powerful it is.
Mumis are social animators, people who intensify
production and then redistribute it. A young man who
wishes to become a mumi must work tirelessly towards
the preparation of communal feasts for the entire tribe to
enjoy. With that, he will gain followers, who will provide
meat and coconuts for even larger feasts. If he is capable
of setting up a larger feast than that of establishes, his
renown will increase, and he will win the followers of the
previous mumi over, becoming the head of the tribe.”

…

“Web mumis, like Flickr or YouTube, provide
free tools for users, and generate in their own servers
social spaces similar to those generated by distributed
networks. By giving up from the start the power to select,
these mumis allow anyone to upload anything; and, more
importantly, they allow anyone to access anything, which
gives users the power of selection.

Essentially, mumis generate great repositories from
what is provided by users themselves, and every user
effects his or her own selection. The system generates a
number of outputs which is in principle as large as the
number of users.”

Discussion

Internet Mumis

David de Ugarte:

“The key to Internet mumis lies in the fact that, like
Melanesian mumis, it is very difficult for them to become
chiefs and charge for their services, returning to a scarcity
economy. Any candidate to mumihood will be able to
repeat his offer at zero price. This being so, once a certain
threshold is crossed, the network effect will act in his
favour and the old mumi will sink into oblivion or retreat
into a marginal market.

This is how Google outstripped Altavista and Yahoo
in the web browser market, and killed off the old Usenet,
where groups where democratically created, by launching
Google Groups, where creation of groups is free.
Mumis are the quickest way to reach an abundance
logic. The effects of the appearance of mumis are similar
to those of the extension of distributed networks. In fact,
mumis can appear as a reaction on the part of the
centralising nodes in charge of a community, producing
scarcity in response to the possibility of the network’s
becoming distributed.

My own favourite example of the way in which a
mumi generates distributed modes of communication is
del.icio.us, a web service which allows us to save pages
that catch our attention, tagging them and saving all
comments in them. del.icio.us was first designed as a way
of enlarging our Favourites list and making it independent
from the computer on which we happened to be browsing.
By including tags, the system allowed us to see not only
how many users had selected that link, but also which
pages under each tag were most popular .

But then a number of sites appeared (reddit, digg and
their clones all over the world) in which users could
nominate and vote for news and blog posts. These services
aggregate all individual votes, and publish on their front
pages a list of the most voted posts. As a whole, all these
voting groups constitute a decentralised
network in which
every site specialises in a language or topic.
In a way, all these sites, like all nodes in a decentralised
network, produce scarcity. Why should
everyone vote to produce one single result? Wouldn't it be
more logical that everyone could tell the system which
results he or she wants to obtain, which users' opinions he
or she wants to consult?

When users started to make these questions and even
set up, with free software, similar systems for their own
communities, del.icio.us saw that it had a chance to step
in. Its system could also be employed by users, in an
improved way, to share news among themselves. In fact,
many users were already doing so. By using the RSS feed
generated by del.icio.us for every result page, users were
dynamically publishing on their blogs the favourites they
were earmarking as they read other blogs and news every
day.

No doubt few people would add to their blog the
world total resulting from aggregating the favourites of all
del.icio.us users; but they certainly consult the system to
see what other things are being earmarked by their friends,
colleagues, and acquaintances – by the people in their
network with whom they share common interests, or
whose tastes they are at least curious about.

And so del.icio.us launched del.icio.us network, a way
of earmarking other users as a part of your network, and of
picking from their accounts, in live time, the links they
earmark as they browse the web. Of course, the fact that
someone earmarks you as a part of their own network
doesn't mean that they will be included in your own
network until you aggregate them. In that way, every user
can obtain a different aggregation based on other users'
choices. Thus, del.icio.us, while centralising its system,
distributes and generate as many different aggregations as
would be produced by a distributed network, and
generates, de facto, a distributed information network.

reddit was the first aggregator to see the coming
threat: it was better to be a mumi, and give everyone
whatever they wished, than be displaced by an outburst of
community news exchange systems. Thus reddit friends
was born, a version of the service in which each user can
say which votes he or she wants to aggregate and whose
proposals should be voted for. Unlike the original system,
there is no longer a single collective result which everyone
has cast a vote for. There are as many different results as
there are users, interests, and tastes – just in the same way
as if the system of great vote-centralising
nodes had been
replaced by a huge distributed network.
Mumis were one of the first innovations that the
Internet experience brought to information economics.”